Fearsquare: hacking open crime data to critique, jam and subvert the 'aesthetic of danger'

We present a critical evaluation of a locative media application, Fearsquare, which provocatively invites users to engage with personally contextualized risk information drawn from the UK open data crime maps cross-referenced with geo-located user check-ins on Foursquare. Our analysis of user data and a corpus of #Fearsquare discourse on Twitter revealed three cogent appraisals ('Affect', 'Technical' and 'Critical') reflecting the salient associations and aesthetics that were made between different components of the application and interwoven issues of technology, risk, danger, emotion by users. We discuss how the varying strength and cogency of these public responses to Fearsquare call for a broader imagining and analysis of how risk and danger are interpreted; and conclude how our findings reveal important challenges for researchers and designers wishing to engage in projects that involve the computer-mediated communication of risk

A Bayesian-Based Approach for Public Sentiment Modeling

Public sentiment is a direct public-centric indicator for the success of effective action planning. Despite its importance, systematic modeling of public sentiment remains untapped in previous studies. This research aims to develop a Bayesian-based approach for quantitative public sentiment modeling, which is capable of incorporating uncertainty and guiding the selection of public sentiment measures. This study comprises three steps: (1) quantifying prior sentiment information and new sentiment observations with Dirichlet distribution and multinomial distribution respectively; (2) deriving the posterior distribution of sentiment probabilities through incorporating the Dirichlet distribution and multinomial distribution via Bayesian inference; and (3) measuring public sentiment through aggregating sampled sets of sentiment probabilities with an application-based measure. A case study on Hurricane Harvey is provided to demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of the proposed approach. The developed approach also has the potential to be generalized to model various types of probability-based measures

Attitudes expressed in online comments about environmental factors in the tourism sector: an exploratory study

The object of this exploratory study is to identify the positive, neutral and negative environment factors that affect users who visit Spanish hotels in order to help the hotel managers decide how to improve the quality of the services provided. To carry out the research a Sentiment Analysis was initially performed, grouping the sample of tweets (n = 14459) according to the feelings shown and then a textual analysis was used to identify the key environment factors in these feelings using the qualitative analysis software Nvivo (QSR International, Melbourne, Australia). The results of the exploratory study present the key environment factors that affect the users experience when visiting hotels in Spain, such as actions that support local traditions and products, the maintenance of rural areas respecting the local environment and nature, or respecting air quality in the areas where hotels have facilities and offer services. The conclusions of the research can help hotels improve their services and the impact on the environment, as well as improving the visitors experience based on the positive, neutral and negative environment factors which the visitors themselves identified

The application of a business intelligence tool for service delivery improvement : the case of South Africa

Abstract: The global environment requires organisations to adapt and respond quickly to the complexity of its nature. Responding to such an environment depends on real-time information. In the last decade, organisations have relied much on human expertise to extract and analyse and process data into meaningful information for decision making. Many will probably agree with the assertion that the complexity of the globalisation has led to a complexity in modern data analysis, which encompasses different elements (technology and innovation, internet of things and influx of data to name but few), resulting in modern scientific problems. It is evident that organisational knowledge has become the enabling factor for decision-making in both the private and public sector. Yet, the study of the opinion that the advancement of technology and internet of things has complicated matters further for humankind to interpret complex and vast amounts of data at the speed required to keep up with the demands of the global environment in which they operate. Therefore, it is likely that the discovered knowledge may be inaccurate at times. In responding to these dynamics, organisations require computational intelligence systems to transform the data they acquire into real-time meaningful information in order to make informed decisions. ..D.Phil. (Engineering Management

Basic tasks of sentiment analysis

Subjectivity detection is the task of identifying objective and subjective sentences. Objective sentences are those which do not exhibit any sentiment. So, it is desired for a sentiment analysis engine to find and separate the objective sentences for further analysis, e.g., polarity detection. In subjective sentences, opinions can often be expressed on one or multiple topics. Aspect extraction is a subtask of sentiment analysis that consists in identifying opinion targets in opinionated text, i.e., in detecting the specific aspects of a product or service the opinion holder is either praising or complaining about

Patients’ online descriptions of their experiences as a measure of healthcare quality

Introduction Patients are describing their healthcare experiences online using rating websites. There has been substantial professional opposition to this, but the government in England has promoted the idea as a mechanism to improve healthcare quality. Little is known about the content and effect of healthcare rating and review sites. This thesis aims to look at comments left online and assess whether they might be a useful measure of healthcare quality. Method I used a variety of different approaches to examine patients’ comments and ratings about care online. I performed an examination of the comments left on the NHS Choices website, and analysed whether there was a relationship between the comments and traditional patient surveys or other measures of clinical quality. I used discrete choice experiments to look at the value patients place on online care reviews when making decisions about which hospital to go to. I used natural language processing techniques to explore the comments left in free text reviews. I analysed the tweets sent to NHS hospitals in England over a year to see if they contained useful information for understanding care quality. Results The analysis of ratings on NHS Choices demonstrates that reviews left online are largely positive. There are associations between online ratings and both traditional survey methods of patient experience and outcome measures. There is evidence of a selection bias in those who both read and contribute ratings online – with younger age groups and those with higher educational attainment more likely to use them. Discrete choice experiments suggest that people will use online ratings in their decisions about where to seek care, and the effect is similar to that of a recommendation by friends and family. I found that sentiment analysis techniques can be used classify free text comments left online into meaningful information that relates to data in the national patient surveys. However, the analysis of comments on Twitter found that only 11% of tweets were related to care quality. Conclusions Patients rating their care online may have a useful role as a measure of care quality. It has some drawbacks, not least the non-random group of people who leave their comments. However, it provides information that is complementary to current approaches to measuring quality and patient experiences, may be used by patients in their decision-making, and provides timely information for quality improvement. I hypothesise that it is possible to measure a ‘cloud of patient experience’ from all of the sources where patients describe their care online, including social media, and use this to make inferences about care quality. I find this idea has potential, but there are many technical and practical limitations that need to be overcome before it is useful.Open Acces

Chinese Indonesians After May 1998 How They Fit in the Big Picture

For Chinese Indonesians, May 1998 is a significant historical marker, twelfth and thirteenth being two concentrated days of riots and atrocities in Jakarta, followed by more, albeit on smaller scales, in Solo, Surabaya, and a number of other cities. Destruction of properties belonging to them, and rapes of their women, occurred. Then Indonesia witnessed the end of Suharto\u27s rule when the president resigned on 21 May 1998. A gradual political turn-around followed; Chinese Indonesians found room to move. The subsequent governments revoked restrictive regulations put in place by the New Order government, and lifted the suppression on cultural expression by Chinese Indonesians. The situation has progressed in conjunction with China\u27s rise in global economic dominance. Does China\u27s increasing International profile and rising global economic dominance help Chinese Indonesians? This article seeks to find some answer to the question as it looks at the development in the big picture; how and to what extent the social perceptions of Chinese Indonesians have evolved among the mainstream population; how they perceive themselves and believe how others perceive them; and how these may influence their lives as Indonesian citizens